As Lethbridge city council was discussing the future of encampments and homelessness in the city, people camped outside the Lethbridge Stabilization Centre and Shelter were being warned the encampment would be removed again. Council had the discussion on July 5 and the encampment was removed by the end of the week. Mike Fox, director of community service, said people living in camps are given notice five days before a camp is cleaned up.
At the meeting city staff said camps are removed immediately if there is a safety concern or illegal activity, but it is a cyclical process.
“There is a difference between camping and the human rights of somebody having shelter and there are different bylaws across Canada that are being updated to talk about people without shelter and the timelines in certain public spaces for them to allow to set up shelter if there is nowhere for them to be sheltered,” Fox said at the meeting.
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The city will get a staff report in October with an update on the process of dealing with encampments, which will include potential bylaw amendment recommendations.
Fences were put up blocking the boulevard where people were camped outside the shelter last week. Fox said they were not set up by the city, but rather the adjacent landowners — he suspected due to the debris left behind by the camp.
“4,600 kilograms of waste was removed,” he said, “About 200 needles were also removed from the area and that is despite us going by daily to remove needles that you see, so it does show that there was a health concern in the area and that it had been entrenched in the area for quite some time.”
Fox did not have an estimate for how much each encampment cleanup costs the city. “I am sure we will get a better handle on that with starting to do these more regular, where the encampments are bigger in nature and as we remove them we will have a firmer number,” he said.
Fox said he does not know where people go when they are removed from an encampment, but he recognizes an underlying issue with permanent supportive housing and transitional housing, which was worsened by suspended funding by the province in 2019.
“It is hard not having a fixed address and they do move around all communities across Canada and we don’t have a place for them in Lethbridge so we do expect them to pop up in different locations,” he said. “We have seen more in the civic area but the civic encampments have been there for some time and we are organizing an encampment removal there in the next week so again.”
Fox said outreach before removals include directing people where to find services and new funds from the province will enable the city to do more of it. “If they can get into the recovery care and into that system. If we can get them into that, they have a better chance of being housed and staying housed.”
Councillor John Middleton-Hope said at the council meeting he would like to see a relocation strategy for people experiencing homelessness, where people can have a place to stay temporarily on city-owned land. Fox said this is complicated because he does not want to create an area where people are targeted and exploited.
“I have been working with all the stakeholders on multiple ideas and what we have been learning from doing lots of research from across Canada and the States is that we have to be very careful on the way it’s set up, the way it’s monitored to make sure that we respect the rights of people that are enjoying those areas,” he said.
City staff are working on a flowchart identifying gaps in its encampment response to present to council in the fall, according to Fox.
“I don’t believe that Lethbridge will solve the issue of people facing homelessness,” he said. “It’s happening all over the world and no area has the solution but we do work with all agencies and also stakeholders to try and come up with the best solution for all of our residents.”
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